“Look!” said Tom.
Above the mountains a new star had appeared. It was very bright, and it seemed to be growing larger. Tom managed to stand, walking a few paces away from the fountain for a better view.
“Tom, be careful… What is it?”
He looked back at her, his eyes shining. “It’s ODIN! It must have … blown up! That’s what she was doing, before Pennyroyal appeared. She ordered it to destroy itself…”
The new star twinkled like a Quirkemas decoration and then began to fade. At the same instant the roof of the house collapsed with a roar and a rush of sparks, and a spear of pain went through Tom’s side, so much worse than before that even as he fell, he knew this was the end of him.
Hester ran to him, her arms around him; he heard her screaming at the top of her lungs, “Pennyroyal! Pennyroyal!”
Pennyroyal reached the docking pan and saw the boy creep out of the pines to meet him. Even here the ground was lit by the glow of the fire on the island; the sky yacht’s silvery envelope shone cheerfully with orange reflections. Pennyroyal waved the key as he hurried toward it. “Nothing to fear now, young Fishpaste! I sorted your Stalker out. All it took was a bit of good old-fashioned pluck.”
He unlocked the gondola and climbed inside, the boy following. The yacht was a Serapis Sunbeam, rather like the one Pennyroyal had owned in Brighton. He squeezed into the pilot’s seat and quickly found the key slot under the main control wheel. Lights began coming on. The fuel and gas gauges all showed half full, and the engines worked after a couple of attempts. “First I must collect my young friends,” Pennyroyal said. After what they had just endured together, he felt Tom and Hester really were his friends; his comrades. He was determined that he would save young Tom.
“No,” said Fishcake coldly, from just behind him.
“Eh? But it’s all right, child; there’s no danger now…”
“Go now,” said Fishcake, and he reached around from behind the pilot’s seat and pressed one of the blades of Pennyroyal’s own pocketknife against his throat.
“They left me behind,” he said.
In the garden Hester heard the engines rumble and rise, and said, “He’s coming, Tom, the airship’s coming!”
Tom wasn’t listening. All he heard was the word “airship,” and as all pain and feeling began to leave him, he saw again the bright ships lifting from Salthook on the afternoon that London ate it, long ago.
The sky yacht rose and hung above the garden. The downdraft from its engine pods whipped Hester’s hair about and made the burning house behind her roar like a furnace. She looked up. Fishcake was staring down at her through one of the gondola windows. She recognized the look on his face, solemn and triumphant all at once, and she felt sorry for him, for all the things he must have seen and been through, and all the long miles he had had to come for his revenge. Then he turned from the window and shouted something at Pennyroyal and the yacht rose, curving away toward the mountains, the drone of its engines whispering into silence.
There’s no way out this time, Hester thought. And then she thought, There is always a way out. She pulled Fishcake’s long, thin-bladed knife out of her belt again and laid it down in the shadows beside her, where it gleamed with reflections from the fire; a narrow doorway leading out of the world.
She kissed Tom’s face, and for a moment he half woke, although he still didn’t quite know where he was; memories and real life were all tangled up inside his mind, and he thought that he was lying on the bare earth, on that first day, fresh-fallen out of London. But he didn’t care, because Hester was with him, holding him tight, watching him, and he thought how lucky he was to be loved by someone so strong, and brave, and beautiful.
And the last thing he felt was the touch of her mouth as she kissed him good-bye, and the last thing he heard was her gruff, gentle voice saying, “It will be all right, Tom. Wherever we go now, whatever becomes of us, we’ll be together, and it will all be all right.”
Chapter 53
The Afterglow
When they came for Oenone, it was still dark, and the breeze that blew in through the small window of the room where they’d been holding her smelled of ash. Faint Earth tremors shivered the floor. She had been feeling them all night in her sleep. Her dreams had been filled with the crash of falling masonry echoing across the valley from Batmunkh Gompa.
She washed her aching face in cold water and said her prayers, assuming they were taking her to be killed. But when they led her down the stairs, she found Subgeneral Thien waiting for her. He looked weary and slightly dazed, and his uniform was streaked with dirt.
“Naga is dead,” he said.
Oenone saw him staring at her broken nose and the bruises that had spread around her eyes. If Naga was dead, then Thien was the most senior officer in Batmunkh Gompa, she thought. He would try to seize power for himself, and he would not want her around to remind people of the man he was replacing.
“Come with me, please,” he said.
She followed him outside, onto a balcony where the cold wind tugged at her clothes. The southern sky was a wall of shadow, lit faintly from behind by the red flaring of the volcano. The voices of the nuns chanted steadily somewhere inside the building, the chant rising in volume for a while each time the ground shook. In the courtyard below the balcony Oenone saw hundreds of faces looking up expectantly; Green Storm soldiers and aviators; refugees from Tienjing.
She felt nervous in front of such an audience, but not afraid of dying. She knew that poor Naga would be waiting for her in heaven, and her mother and father, too, and her brother Eno; all those whom she had loved and lost, who had gone ahead of her.
“What do you make of it?” asked Thien. He was looking upward too, and she realized that it was not at her the people in the courtyard were staring, but at something above her head; above the roofs of the nunnery; above the mountains. Across the few patches of the sky that were still clear, hundreds of shooting stars were streaking, white and green and icy blue.
“What do you make of it?” asked Thien again.
He wanted her scientific opinion, Oenone realized. She licked her lips, which had grown very dry. “I would say that something—some things —are falling into the upper atmosphere.”
“More weapons?” Thien sounded very scared.
Oenone watched for a moment, thinking. “No. No, I think it’s a good thing. I think something big has exploded in orbit, and those stars are some of the fragments, burning up.”
“The cities’ weapon?” asked Thien. “You think it is destroyed?”
“It was not theirs,” Oenone said. She was about to explain her theory about the Stalker Fang, and tell him that Grike must have found the ground station and destroyed it, but it would be better kept a secret; if the cities learned who had turned ODIN on them, it would lead to more fighting. “It was all an accident,” she said. “Some old orbital, gone mad. Let’s pray it’s over.”